When we look at the sky at night, we can see thousands of stars in our galaxy. Unfortunately, the number of stars we can see is decreasing day by day due to increasing light pollution, so we no longer have this beautiful view. An image shared by scientists a few days ago reveals the gigantic size of our galaxy.

Researchers in Chile Dark Energy Camera (DECam) obtained this result using Including billions of stars in the Milky Way, this huge dataset 3.32 billion celestial bodies is stated to be involved. Although this number is huge, the objects in the study contain only a small part of our galaxy.

Here is just a small part of the dataset

You can click on this link to view the project in detail and access the full dataset.

The US National Science Foundation’s National Optical Infrared Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) operates DECam as part of an observatory project in Chile. Since the new astronomical dataset is the second version of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, DECaPS2 is called. Completion of DECaPS2lasted 2 years and more than 10 terabytes of data were generated.

NOIRLab also describes their work as “demonstrably curated to date largest catalog” he described. Given that there are hundreds of billions of stars, giant clouds of gas and dust in our galaxy, we can say that cataloging these objects is a huge and challenging task. According to the statements, the camera used optical and infrared wavelengths of light to detect star-forming regions and dust clouds.

Debra Fischer of the National Science Foundation also said: “Imagine a picture of over 3 billion people standing together and each individual recognizable. Astronomers predict more than 3 billion objects in the Milky Way in the coming years. this detailed portrait will judge” used the sentences.